New York, NY – The Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) and New York University, in collaboration with the Mbaasem Foundation, will present Yari Yari Ntoaso: Continuing the Dialogue – An International Conference on Literature by Women of African Ancestry. This major conference will put writers, critics, and readers from across Africa, the USA, Europe, and the Caribbean in dialogue with each other in Accra, Ghana, May 16‐19, 2013.

The public can help support authors’ participation athttp://www.indiegogo.com/projects/318981
OWWA is deeply saddened by the loss of its President and Co‐Founder, Jayne Cortez, the amazing poet, performer, and activist described by The New York Times as “one of the central figures of the Black Arts Movement.” Cortez was the driving force behind the first two Yari Yari conferences, and OWWA and NYU’s Institute of African‐American Affairs have committed to presenting the third Yari Yari as scheduled in Jayne’s honor.

The conference will consist of panels, readings, performances, and film screenings, and will be devoted to the study, evaluation, and celebration of the creativity and diversity of women writers of African descent. Fifteen years after OWWA’s first major conference, Yari Yari Ntoaso continues the dialogue of previous Yari Yari gatherings, which were the largest events of their kind, putting hundreds of women writers and scholars of African descent in dialogue with thousands of people. Confirmed participants come from more than a dozen countries, and include individuals who have been Poet Laureates and won a variety of other awards. (See the list of participants below.)
OWWA is actively fundraising to cover the costs of Yari Yari Ntoaso, and the Cortez/Edwards family encourages donations in Jayne’s name to OWWA. Donations are tax-deductible and can be made at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/318981 or mailed to P.O. Box 652; Village Station; New York, NY 10014.
Yari Yari Ntoaso is FREE to everyone who wants to attend; attendees should register
online at http://www.owwainc.org where information about travel discounts and logistics are also available. Updates will be posted regularly on OWWA’s Indiegogo site and Facebook page.

Up at 2am. I’ve *never* had insomnia like this before. Once a month I’ll have a restless night but I’ve never found myself progressively losing sleep like this. It was happening in Brooklyn, too—over the past couple of months I started to wake at six, then five, then four. So what could it mean? Around 4am this morning I decided that it must be related to my ancestor search. Each time I find another generation and reach farther into the past, I lose an hour of sleep! The only good thing about this is that I have moments of lucidity while self-directing my waking dreams. I realized this morning that I want to open a museum. Not just an arts center, but a museum. What I haven’t found here in Nevis so far is a critical, comprehensive examination of slavery. The perspective of colonizers and slave owners is still being privileged—the one ghost story that’s mentioned in the tourist material I’ve gathered is a white woman whose fiance shot her brother in a duel and then proposed to another woman. So she shut herself up in her great house and now haunts the crumbling remains. THAT is the ghost story we’re supposed to care about? I realize the intent is not to alienate tourists who are primarily white, but I think it’s a mistake to assume that whites don’t want to know the truth about slavery. In fact, the greater risk is getting too deep, too graphic, and turning the past into another kind of exotic artifact. I mean, we have to have a conversation about language—what’s in a name? Why does the word “plantation” trigger positive associations for tourists and negative associations for me? I can already see a panel in my museum that will list “Ways to Be a Better Tourist.” All the grant-writing experience I’ve been accumulating will come in handy because I’ll need a major grant to make this happen. Everything prepares you for what’s next. I’ve been teaching this course on neo-slave narratives, and now I can select the best slavery novels for my museum bookstore. I’m going to enlarge those slave registers and line the walls with them. I’ll find an artist to develop a rendition of the mass suicide that took place in 1736 when 100 slaves jumped from the Prince of Orange slave ship anchored off the coast of Nevis. The history book I’m reading suggests it was a “cruel joke” that prompted an enslaved man to board the ship with his owner and tell the slaves that they were to be eaten once they were taken ashore. Maybe what he really said was, “Life as a slave on this island is unbearable,” and the newly arrived Africans decided death was the better option.

Ok, I better get myself ready to go. Alexander Hamilton House, lunch with Amba, and then all that other stuff. And maybe another nap on the beach…

POVERTY THREATENS OUR DEMOCRACY
Smiley and West take on the “P” word—poverty. During this compelling lecture and book-signing they challenge all Americans to re-examine their assumptions about poverty in America-what it really is and how to eradicate it.

Each year The Brotherhood/Sister Sol co-sponsors an educational panel that focuses on solutions to the educational crisis we face in New York City – and indeed throughout the nation. The inadequate level of education provided to the children of this nation who are most in need is the pre-eminent civil rights issue of our time. Each year our educational panel has been filled to capacity and each evening has been a truly powerful night that has moved from the normal platitudes and simplistic debate to real discussion.

On Tuesday, March 6th, at 7:30, we are co-sponsoring this important event with The Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University.

This event is free – but you must register for what promises to be a rich conversation focused on results, solutions and big picture thinking:

The Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University & The Brotherhood/Sister Sol present…Looking Ahead: What is working in New York City for Educating Our Children?

I don’t want to talk about the situation in Arizona—the white woman governor poking her finger in the president’s face, the need for brown-skinned immigrants like me to carry ID at all times, and now the banning of books that do nothing more than tell the TRUTH. I wrote about the dismantling of the Mexican American Studies Program in a post I’ve submitted to a Canadian government blog—if it gets published this week, I’ll let you know. I wrote about Wednesday’s “Teach-in” in emails to my colleagues at work. I plan to talk about it when classes start tomorrow because I doubt my students are aware of the pressure across the country to do away with Ethnic Studies in schools AND universities. But I’m sorry to say that right now I don’t want to blog about it here. I’ll just point you to Edi’s fabulous list of links, which includes the important work Debbie Reese is doing over at AICL. I’ve asked my college to order a copy of Precious Knowledge and will screen it this semester as part of our Ethnic Studies Film Series. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. Because we all have a choice at moments like these: do something, or do nothing.

On Monday I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Angela Davis; she was being filmed by OWWA (Organization of Women Writers of Africa) and that interview will be added to their collection at the Schomburg. We gathered at NYU at the Institute for African Affairs and Rashidah Ismailistarted the interview by asking Dr. Davis to reflect on her childhood and the early influences in her life. We learned that both of her parents were school teachers and so Davis grew up in a home where she was encouraged to read and grow—she and all of her siblings left home as teens, with Dr. Davis going to New York for her last two years of high school. She moved in radical circles and learned from her family members not to talk to the FBI—a lesson that came in handy when she was later arrested as a fugitive. The remark that most stood out to me was Dr. Davis’ assessment of her parents’ vision for her; more than once she stressed the importance of the imagination and the need for young people to “not be too ensconced in the present.” Dr. Davis’ mother fought to secure an education for herself and then made sure her children understood that they had to prepare for a reality that didn’t yet exist. The interview ended with a Q&A and Pam asked an intriguing question about the Buddhist principle of mindfulness: how do you stay present in each moment if you’re constantly looking ahead? That’s a big challenge for any creative writer because we spend so much of our time dreaming; as a writer of historical and speculative fiction, I’m often lost in the past or the future, and it can be difficult to stay on top of your responsibilities (like grading!) when you’re trying to produce work that will hopefully create change. My question was related to an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with some friends on what it means to be an “ethical professor.” One friend’s college is considering merit pay, but if all faculty at the school are being underpaid, what does a two thousand dollar bonus for a handful of profs do to advance equity? Some friends teach two courses per semester and some teach three; right now I teach four, and others in the community college system teach five or six. That kind of teaching schedule doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for activism! The academy is a conservative institution, so how can one be a radical and/or create change without being changed by the institution? Dr. Davis said she often heard academics who insisted they would do the work they really wanted to do just as soon as they got tenure—or just as soon as they got promoted—or just as soon as….and on it went. “What matters,” she said, “is to do the work wherever you are.” In other words, don’t make excuses and don’t let institutional constraints hold you back. Build community—that was her advice—build a network so that when things go awry, you’ve got people who will lift you up and support your work. Later at lunch I talked to the elder members of OWWA and told them about the challenge of teaching effectively with 38 students in the class. Yes, one professor can make an impact, but how much greater would that impact be if the students who most need quality instruction had a lower student to professor ratio? I’m often torn between wanting to do more for my students and wanting to get my own work done—that’s been especially true this semester since my next book’s in production and certain things need my attention. I wrote three sentences last weekend and wished I could disappear and immerse myself in that new project but I can’t. Not until winter break. And maybe that will be my new writing schedule; maybe I’ll only write short pieces that can be completed while I’m not teaching. Audre Lorde says poetry is the most “economical” art form because women can write it on the train, while doing laundry, while the kids are napping…maybe poetry and novellas are in my future. Today would be my day off but I’ve got a training at work so off I go. If I grade my last midterms on the train, I’ll have a weekend FREE of grading!

I’m a little worried about this bog. The semester’s about to start and I just created a blog for my job (check it out: CESatBMCC); I might need to take a break from Fledgling so that I can wear my professor hat all the time. Then again, do I ever really take it off? I’m sure topics will come up that I can’t fully address on the work blog. This weekend I feel like I’ve been swept away…Hurricane Irene was pretty much what I expected—more of a tropical storm that didn’t really disturb my life in any significant way (thanks to everyone who checked on me just the same!). Woke up this morning and the rain had already stopped and the wind was blowing gently enough for the windows to be reopened. I didn’t lose power and I have food in the house but with the entire NYC transit system shut down, there isn’t anywhere to go. So I’m doing what I usually do on a Sunday afternoon: daydreaming, writing, and watching PBS. A friend asked if I would be getting cable now that I’m working full-time; I’d like to get BBC America (no, not to watch Idris Elba) but it’s hard to imagine anything on cable really competing with the programming on PBS. Global Voices is one of my favorite shows and they’ve got a great fall line-up. I just watched the tail end of a film about Robert Kennedy’s visit to South Africa in 1966 (RFK in the Land of Apartheid). He concluded his visit with a speechat the University of Witwatersrand and these lines jumped out at me:

There are those who say that the game is not worth the candle – that Africa is too primitive to develop, that its peoples are not ready for freedom and self-government, that violence and chaos are unchangeable. But those who say these things should look to the history of every part and parcel of the human race. It was not the black man of Africa who invented and used poison gas or the atomic bomb, who sent six million men and women and children to the gas ovens, and used their bodies as fertilizer. Hitler and Stalin and Tojo were not black men of Africa. And it was not the black men of Africa who bombed and obliterated Rotterdam and Shanghai and Dresden and Hiroshima.

Genocide is not foreign to Africa, of course, but in that moment and in that space, it was incredibly powerful to have a white man speak those words. I want to warn my students away from racial chauvinism but there are moments when the comparisons are necessary. Anyway, my head’s full of other things but maybe I’ll try turning to the new novel. I’m incorporating current events like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the massacre in Oslo. And now Irene will have a place in the story as well…